“Farmageddon”

“Food, Inc.,” the Oscar-nominated documentary that came out in 2009, combined the central arguments of Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) to depict an unsustainable and unhealthy industrial food system. Factory farming, the film argues, creates optimal conditions for the virulent pathogen E. coli O157: H7 to grow, and provides a nationwide delivery system for the bug. The film calls for a rethinking of the food-safety standards, and, among other remedies, suggests that inspections of meatpacking and processing plants be increased.

“Farmageddon,” a documentary that was released this past summer, offers a different critique of the system. The filmmaker is Kristin Canty, a self-described “mom of four,” who gave up on conventional medicine and instead used raw milk to treat the asthma and allergies suffered by one of her children. In pursuit of less-processed foods, Canty visits farms and gets to know farmers, many of whom complain about intense scrutiny of their practices and products. The “-ageddon” of her title refers to the methods used by regulators to bring small producers into compliance: from armed morning raids (as happened to the owner of Manna Storehouse, a food coöperative in Lorain County, Ohio) to the destruction of a herd of Belgian and Dutch sheep in Vermont suspected of harboring mad-cow disease (despite no evidence of contamination, the film claims) and, finally, the enforcement of a search warrant at Rawesome Foods, a private food club in Venice, California, which I write about in the magazine this week. (Here’s a (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5zPhhNUakc) of the 2010 action, showing officers, with guns drawn, securing the fruit and veg.) Less regulation is the call to action here. When Canty talks to Joel Salatin, the farmer-writer made famous by Pollan, whose Polyface Farms, in the Shenandoah Valley, “Farmageddon” (like “Food, Inc.” before it) upholds as a model, he descries “non-scalable capricious regulations” and asks why the government hates freedom.

Surely that question is as simplistic as a food-safety policy that would apply the same standards to a factory-farm operation and to a small farm serving a few hundred people. Regulations are in place to protect the public. It is worth asking if the current approach is outmoded, with, on the one hand, increasing consolidation in the food-production business and, on the other, consumer demand for food produced in non-industrial settings. Last year, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act, which the F.D.A. describes as “the most sweeping reform of our food safety laws in more than 70 years.” It authorizes mandatory recall—a change the voices of “Food, Inc.” would likely celebrate—and small-farm exemptions that might please the “Farmageddon” folks. (Before the bill was signed, the Web site Grist hosted a debate about it.)

The F.S.M.A. hasn’t been around long enough to prove its effectiveness on either front. For now, the underlying issue for the owners and producers behind private food clubs, coöps, and herd shares through which raw milk and other farm products are distributed is this: will the members-only contracts protect them when they choose to sell food that the government has been declared illegal? The case of Dan Allgyer, an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania whose out-of-state business selling raw milk to a private D.C.-area food club that a judge recently shut down by permanent injunction—effectively putting Allgyer out of business—suggests that the climate might not be so welcoming. According to Lancaster Online, the judge declared the herdshare agreement by which Allgyer supplied the club, Grassfed on the Hill, to be “subterfuge.” That agreement is essentially the same one that Rawesome’s Venice members signed—both were designed by the raw-milk-and-meat nutrition advocate Aajonus Vonderplanitz—the validity of which is likely to be central to the case in Los Angeles.

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.